What’s the Problem with Google Glass?

I remember listening to music on my iPhone one morning in the salty, rust-tinged gym at the Dolphin Club, one of the oldest swimming and boating clubs in San Francisco. An elderly man in a Speedo tapped me on the shoulder. “We don’t do that here,” he said, pointing to my headphones as I removed them. “The Walkman effect,” a term coined by the music scholar Shuhei Hosokawa in 1984, refers to the disconnection between a person using headphones to listen to music and her surroundings. It turned out that the man had been trying to tell me something important as I listened to Rihanna on the Stairmaster.

In most places outside the Dolphin Club, headphone use hasn’t raised an eyebrow for nearly a quarter of a century. It seems normal that certain technologies let us immerse ourselves in a private environment while in the public sphere. Google Glass, the company’s new wearable computer built into glasses, promises to allow users to access their e-mails, texts, and the Internet via voice and physical commands, while keeping their eyes on the world. The social norms for the product have yet to be established; Google cautions wearers to be prepared for a reaction when wearing them in the real world. Those reactions are not always positive. Google Glass is a computer on your face, which has been a hard sell for many.

Sarah Slocum, a technology and marketing consultant, was wearing Google Glass last week when she entered Molotov’s, a neighborhood dive bar with a punk vibe on Haight Street in San Francisco, around 1:30 A.M. on February 21st. “Molotov’s is not really Google Glass country,” Brian Parks, a thirty-two-year-old who patronizes the bar but wasn’t there that night, told a local news station. Slocum was at the end of a pub crawl when she entered Molotov’s, and patrons were less than pleased. A woman at the bar flipped her off, and another guy tore the glasses from her face and ran off with them. He eventually returned them, but, Slocum said, her purse and other belongings went missing amid the confusion. Slocum posted a YouTube video of part of the incident, recorded through her Google Glass, in which the woman who flipped her off is shown telling her, “You’re killing the city.” That sentiment has been echoed in many other San Francisco dustups related to the area’s rapid influx of tech wealth. Some see Google Glass as the perfect symbol of the current struggle.

I know the woman in the video—the one who flipped Slocum off and told her she was killing San Francisco—casually through a mutual friend. She hasn’t spoken to the press about what happened and talked to me only on the condition of anonymity. She told me that when she saw Slocum wearing Google Glass, she felt uncomfortable and assumed she was being recorded. “I couldn’t believe someone was wearing them in the bar,” she said. “It did not sit right with me. When she looked my way I flipped her off so she knew how I felt about her wearing them there.” The woman, an off-duty bartender employed at Molotov’s, said she was fired after the incident drew media attention.

“People know I’m soft-spoken, so they were surprised that I said anything to her, but I felt like I needed to protect our town,” she told me. “When I saw her wearing the glasses, all I could think of was my friends who are being pushed out of the city. The only people who can afford to live here are techies. I was born and raised here, and for the first time in my life I want to leave.”

Slocum, who was also raised in the Bay Area, acknowledged that the conflict stemmed partly from the perception among some that Google Glass is a symbol of privilege and the rising presence of affluent tech workers in the community. “I think this whole situation is very much about techies versus non-techies,” she said. “It’s rooted in the fact that Google Glass is seen as a new product that only certain people have access to.” But she said that the people at the bar made assumptions about her. “Maybe they saw me as some super-wealthy élite and privileged person,” she said. “I’ve been struggling to make good money as well. I totally understand these people. I’m not a tech millionaire, but even if I was their behavior was uncalled for.”

Slocum received the glasses about a month ago from a developer friend who wasn’t using them on a regular basis. She wears them regularly, and was approved to join Google Glass’s Explorer program, which uses a small group of testers, now in the thousands, to receive feedback on the product and how it is perceived. Slocum finds that most people respond with enthusiasm. “Ninety-nine per cent of the time, it’s a very positive experience,” she said. I asked her what she thought had gone wrong this time. “This instance is predominately rooted in misunderstanding and a lack of knowledge about the technology,” she said. “Whenever there are new and emerging technologies, there is always going to be some resistance.”

There are also privacy concerns. The general public doesn’t seem aware of exactly how Google Glass works, and people often assume it’s recording at all times. (It isn’t, unless the wearer speaks a command or takes a physical action, and the screen illuminates when recording, making it clear to others that it is recording.)

“I didn’t start recording until I got called names and flipped off, in hopes that they would correct and refrain their behavior,” Slocum told me. “Instead, it instigated the situation.”

The woman in the video recalls that after she flipped Slocum off, she saw the light on her Google Glass turn on. She asked Slocum to stop and was ignored. “She was talking shit to me the whole time,” she said. “I have said that I’m not comfortable with people taking pictures of me when I’m at the bar. Facial recognition scares the shit out of me.” (Update: Slocum said that she doesn’t recall being asked to stop recording.)

Why does Google Glass make people uncomfortable when cell phones and cameras are routinely accepted? It’s not as if the actual recording of images is particularly controversial; most bars comfortably allow you to take selfies and Instagram your row of Jäger shots. But snapping with your smartphone gets a pass, whereas Glass often arouses suspicion. Part of the reason may be that Glass bypasses the familiar, disarming physical ritual of photography: when a person raises a camera, or a smartphone, everyone know what it means. Somehow an indicator light seems insufficient to overcome perceptions of Glass as furtive and dishonest. Some businesses have asked Google Glass users to remove their wearables or leave.

Mat Honan, a Google Glass user, wrote in an essay for Wired that he has a hard time figuring out where the device will be welcome. “I’m not wearing my $1,500 face computer on public transit where there’s a good chance it might be yanked from my face,” he wrote. “I won’t wear it out to dinner, because it seems as rude as holding a phone in my hand during a meal. I won’t wear it to a bar. I won’t wear it to a movie.” He went on, “Again and again, I made people very uncomfortable. That made me very uncomfortable. People get angry at Glass. They get angry at you for wearing Glass.”

Chris Dale, a spokesman for Google Glass, declined to comment on the incident at Molotov’s but spoke generally about etiquette. “We know that new technology raises new concerns,” he wrote in an e-mail. “That’s why the goal of our Explorer program is to get Glass in the hands of people from all walks of life. They provide feedback on the product, and help others understand how Glass works. Our Explorers have also been great at coming up with useful etiquette that provides their suggestions on how to use Glass in social settings.”

Google published the user-generated etiquette guidelines last month. They even acknowledge the term “glasshole”—slang for people wearing the glasses in a fashion that comes across as rude. Slocum doesn’t consider herself a glasshole, but rather an ambassador for the new technology: “It’s exciting for me. I’m able to explain to them that it’s just like a cell phone.” When I asked Slocum about etiquette for wearing Glass, she felt that the rules should be “no different from using a cell phone. It’s ridiculous to think that any normal restaurant or bar could ask you to leave your cell phone at the door. If they did, that business would fail.”

She and many others argue that Google Glass will soon be ubiquitous. “Some of the irony is that the people hating on me for wearing Google Glass are probably going to have a pair in six months or a year,” Slocum said. The anonymous woman in the video laughed when I asked her if she saw herself in Google Glass in six months to a year: “Are you kidding? I was late to get a cell phone. I will never wear those glasses. Never.” Even some within the tech community seem less than totally enthusiastic about Google Glass; at Fast Company, Mark Wilson pointed out that even some Google insiders choose not to wear the glasses in public.

In the years since Hosokawa described the Walkman effect, unspoken rules for using headphones in public spaces have developed and are largely respected. Often this simply means knowing when and where to remove them. Perhaps enjoying a drink in a lively bar is one of those times. When I finally removed my headphones that morning at the Dolphin Club, I was able to hear the information the older gentlemen were trying to share with me. People were being told not to venture into the bay, because a shark had been spotted, circling close to shore.